The Guardian reports on the ridiculously expensive (and arguably ridiculous) cull of Ruddy ducks in Britain. These ducks, an introduced American species are accused of interbreeding with Spanish ducks and hence threatening their racial purity. So the British ducks must apparently be hunted to extinction at a cost of £5m so far.

Personally I find these attempts to halt nature in its tracks to be bizarre. Sometimes species colonise new areas and wipe others out (or interbreed creating new ones) – fact of life. Are we just undoing the original mistake of introducing the alien species, or was that introduction just part of nature too? After all we humans are just another species having our own particular impact on the world. I'd better stop before it all gets too meta.